Electronic mail (also known as e-mail) is a network service that allows users to send and receive messages and files quickly by electronic communication systems. This name is primarily used to describe the system that provides this service on the Internet through the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), but by extension it can also be applied to similar systems using other technologies. Through email not only text can be sent, but all kinds of digital documents. Its efficiency, convenience and low cost are causing email to take the place of regular mail for many common uses.
It is widely accepted that in 1971 Ray Tomlinson sent to itself the first email in history through ARPANET, the forerunner of today's Internet. Nowadays, millions of people and organizations around the world exchange billions of emails every day. Email is clearly one of the most widespread methods of communication in the world, but will not necessarily be efficient as evidence from a legal perspective.
The emails are normally sent and received in plain text or HTML formats and without signature of any kind; therefore they have the same evidentiary value as any other private document that can be presented as evidence, thus emails may need to be corroborated by other means. If it is wanted a sent email to be constitutive of proof, it is necessary to accredit this email in some way.
Today, there are many online services addressed to overcome this lack through different procedures, but, in spite of their legal strength, most of them share at least one of the following drawbacks: their cost; emails have to be written and/or sent from non-standard email client software; emails may need to be accessed by the recipients from a source different than standard email client software; and recipients are aware that emails and the access to their content are being registered by express desire of senders.
The European application EP1476995B1 discloses a method of transmitting a message from a sender to a destination address. Generally speaking, a server receives a message from a sender and transmits the message through the Internet to a recipient. The server normally transmits the message in a first path through the Internet to the recipient. When the sender indicates at a particular position in the message that the message must be registered, the server transmits the message in a second path through the Internet to the recipient. The sender can also provide additional indications in the message to have the server handle the message in other special ways not normally provided by the server.
It is also described in EP1476995B1 that after learning from the receipt or the recipient's agent through the Internet that the message was successfully received, the server creates and forwards to the sender an electronic receipt. The receipt includes at least one and preferably all: the message and any attachments, a delivery success/failure table listing the receipts, and the receipt times of the message by the recipient's specific agents, and the failure of other agents of the recipient to receive the message and a digital signature of the message and attachments subsequently. By verifying that the digital signature on the sender's receipt matches the digital receipt at the server, the server can verify, without retaining the message, that the receipt is genuine and that the message is accurate.
Thus, the method described in EP1476995B1 seems to keep good evidence over time about the content of a particular email and its delivery to a recipient, without notifying the recipient that the email and the access to its content are being registered. Therefore, this method seems to reduce complexity, cost, indiscretion and other drawbacks previously outlined.
Nevertheless, the method of EP1476995B1 has the drawback of requiring specific adaptations in the email server through which the email message from the sender is transmitted to the destination address. In fact, said email server related to the sender must have implemented the functionalities under which the email is transmitted in a first path or in a second path depending on some indication from the sender. This means that if a sender wants to use the method EP1476995B1 for sending an email, he/she will not be able to do so unless the required functionalities are implemented in his/her email server or his/her email provider's servers. Said “extra” functionalities of redirecting the email may unnecessarily decrease the efficiency of the overall process of sending the email.
Moreover, even in the case of the sender's email server having implemented the functionalities of redirecting the email, there may be scenarios in which said redirection of emails may not be performed. For example, if a user sends an email message from a BlackBerry device through the Research In Motion Ltd. (RIM) email network, the email message is transmitted by the RIM's email servers directly to the recipient's email server. In such scenario the email message is not processed by the sender's “normal” email server. Thus, redirection of the email is not performed and, therefore, any particular indication (requesting e.g. register of the email) provided by the sender is meaningless and incomprehensible to the RIM's email servers and causes no special treatment of the email by RIM's email servers. Consequently, the email will not be registered, as expected by the sender, and the particular indication will not be removed and will remain visible and noticeable to the recipient.